Sony Magazine: Gadgets + bloke in suit = £4.50

I was fortunate enough to be sent the first issue of Sony Magazine in the post today. This 100-page Haymarket publication, edited by Loaded co-founder Tim Southwell, is, for definite, an actual proper magazine and in no way a Curry’s Digital newspaper insert printed on slightly thicker paper. Oh no.

Apparently,

Sony Magazine is all about heroes. It is about access to the most exciting people, extraordinary events and incredible gadgets on planet earth. It is about making all this come alive and come together in a package that is as stylish and provocative as the content itself.

It’s also all about an ambitious cover price of £4.50. Readers are invited to subscribe.

In fairness, there’s an interview with Cameron Diaz in there, pieces on Rick Rubin and Marvin Gaye (all three, perhaps unsurprisingly, are linked to Sony’s motion picture or music divisions) and various other stuff.

The eight pages of adverts for Sony products are indistinguishable from the ten-page gadget-porn “Showcase” section towards the back, which basically consists of beautifully-lit, glistening full frontal close-ups of Sony products. There’s also a feature on the making of a Sony advert and some Blu-Ray propaganda. Which is all fair enough if it was free but would anyone actually pay almost a fiver for it?

The piece that really stands out is a clunky, Loaded-circa-1996-style travelogue in which a supposed city dwelling bloke (in a black three-piece suit) is dumped on the side of a Spanish mountain with nothing but a Sony laptop for company. Ignoring the naffness of the premise, the piece perfectly illustrates the problems of trying to balance a fun piece of gonzo journalism with the base commercial imperative that is the raison d’etre of all contract publishing.

For example, the four-page feature repeatedly refuses to call the laptop a laptop, which, as far as I’m aware, is the usual English word for laptop. Instead it insists on calling the laptop a “VAIO”. Or, worse, “the VAIO”. Or sometimes “a tiny notebook computer: Sony’s VAIO TZ”. (If Sony made spades, you can bet they wouldn’t call them spades.) And the VAIO, it quickly turns out, is the author’s one way out of the stinking hell hole to which he has been dispatched. Well, that and a bloke in a jeep.

The piece is also full of clumsy, barely-concealed promotional slogans:

The quickest route to the road is to clamber down through the terraced lemon groves… The squashed lemons also make the rocks that much more slippery. In such circumstances the size of the VAIO is proving to be a real boon. Weighing around the same size as a medium-sized airport novel, it has little or no effect on my balance.

That’s useful to know. In the end the writer, Ben Marshall (still in his black fucking suit) manages to get a lift down the mountain and uses Skype to win a bet over the issue of whether or not Spain has a decent “technical infrastructure”. You know, wi-fi and that. (Apparently, hot topic fans, it does.)

Luckily, if I visit www.sonymagazine.co.uk it says I can get three FREE issues of this tedious rubbish “stylish and provocative” magazine package, saving £13.50 on the cover price. But I must ACT NOW. Unfortunately, however, the website doesn’t seem to have been built yet, so I can’t. Damn.

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